thelee

just wanted to confirm some other things said earlier - I previously had speculated that if I were to try again, I would maybe go for Woedica because their spiritual weapon (monk fists + raw lash) is better than skaen's (club/stiletto + pierce lash). But I think to confirm what Decadency alluded to, I honestly can't imagine doing a brilliant-based run that doesn't have a huge source of invisibility like skaen does (or blood mage) thanks to Arcane Dampener and Arcane Cleansing. Nemnok wasn't bad - just had to bait it all out with a few spiritual allies. But Concelhaut is giving me a surprising amount of trouble for my practice character because Concelhaut appears to be on a timer instead of having authentic spell casts, which means casting Dampener or Cleansing even after they've already cast a few. I just had a practice character die because they got Skyward Kicked and were lying on the ground and during the like 1.5s of lying down and then additional standing up time, Concelhaut started and then completed an Arcane Cleansing I didn't know they had left. (Invisibility also helps against dodging Form of the Helpless Beast, which I needed to do a couple times with Nemnok and in Forgotten Sanctum. Not as critical though because with all my buffs Helpless Beasts's tusks are a decent weapon [my practice character literally knocked off like 50% of the final oracle's health just with tusks], and I ended up picking up Monastic Unarmed Training as backup just for these cases where I un-shapeshift and no longer have spiritual weapon.) That being said, it's just a matter of time still. My practice character is doing way better on time than I anticipated - at Concelhaut with 17 days left, with only Auranic and Ukaizo remaining. My real character is catching up and approaching Act IV. Sometimes I fantasize about being able to play Deadfire for pure fun again.

yes, robes of the weyc is stupidly exploitable. unless you're doing a rest-constrained run, it's not even a big deal to just rest every few empowers.

I don't generally use mods, but I have unintentionally done SHIFT+hotkey enough times to try to buffer an ability that I could almost kill for a mod like this.

congrats decadency! also, eff me, that Kōhatekana Expanse has a FORCED REST during the scripted encounter. WHY OH WHY did they ever have this "feature"??? edit - good thing i wasn't actually reliant on captain's banquet. sad to lose hylea's bounty... so i guess no +4 skills for me, just the +2 from luminous adra.

how long has it been since you submitted it? how long did it take for decadency? i have to imagine they are actually watching the entire videos (maybe on higher speed). must be a tedious job for someone at obsidian HQ.

lololol too bad it doesn't also heal vela

yeah good thing I'm practicing SSS, the AI is indeed super weird. Have to double-check what goes in Decadency's vids (maybe Decadency just super-charges brilliant in the first fight and don't bother needing to buff/hide in the later ones), but the Naga fight and the first vs enemy party fight have weird AI (probably some of the final ones, too, but haven't gotten to them yet). For some reason some of the characters seem to have a behavior where they appear to go to the last known position of a viable target instead of resetting, which means standing right on top of you or Vela with withdraw. Fortunately, I found a way to bait them around so I can still completely de-aggro them, but it definitely required me to lean on shadowing beyond so I could lure enemies into one area and then invis and withdraw elsewhere. That being said, I don't think I've ever roflstomped SSS so hard as with a brilliant+BDD+scordeo's character.

more spaghetti code specifically it sounds like it's just the +2 all skills deal. also I didn't want to add more confusion at the time, but i didn't do a save/load cycle when I verified this on one of my test characters. I did do a zone transition - I started on worldmap, rested with Hylea, entered an area, quaffed the luminous adra potion. Blammo, got +4 all skills. While there was an autosave and a zone load, there was no reloading of the game. Don't know if that affects anything.

wow that makes the +PL bonuses from food potentially much better then (mostly thinking about a brain-dead way to boost monk or monastic unarmed training fists)

possibly, but my run has been leaning heavily on hylea's bounty. helped to do a lot of non-violent options, which is faster than actually fighting. i wish i had a test case that makes for a stronger case for it but like i said i wasted a lot of time unnecessarily doing huana quest.

so I haven't verified SSS yet (it's next on my practice character before going back to my real run and plugging forward since it's basically my last unknown), but all the SSS fights start you off in a safe area that doesn't trigger combat. So long as that exists then I'm fine; I watched Decadency's SSS clears to make sure there was plenty of room to do buffing in peace. The water dragon on other hand was a problem because there was literally no spot in that fight that was not visible to the water dragon or its tentacles, so I had to pre-buff with the cloak while fighting the naga upstairs since I literally couldn't beyond+withdraw away to do tactician brilliant. (edit - but, you never know. which is why I feel like I need to practice it beforehand. Also to make sure I have an answer to all the annoying skill checks in SSS) In previous similar fights, it might require a bit of Vela management to patiently wait to have her walk to the edge of the map, then I Halt her, run towards the fight, lure enemies back, then invis+withdraw. This way Vela starts cowering, and once she cowers she stays within a small-ish area that I can safely buff us or dance back and forth between the enemies and my safe spot without worrying about Vela messing things up. Might need a withdraw at times to fully de-aggro the enemies after I escape back, but I'm generally not using my level 2 spells anyway so I always have withdraw available.

So this is probably actually one great advantage of a tactician over being cloak-reliant. Most fights as tactician/skaen you don't need the cloak (so far I've penciled in a few times where it's really advantageous/required to do so <water dragon, fire dragon, and maybe to only have to do the big buffing once or twice for BoW>; I might pencil in a few more), so you don't need to worry about losing brilliant because you won't actually have it during most fights - you just have it while you buff. If for some reason I need to buff again, all I have to do is Shadowing Beyond+Withdraw and that basically resets Brilliant (this is actually very important for the fights that I need the cloak, because I don't have a fire wall to self-trigger the cloak; I literally just buff a bit, stand there with a stopwatch while enemies attack me, and if I haven't triggered cloak brilliant when my timer goes off I invis, reset, buff again, rinse and repeat until I get the cloak to proc). So I only need to be concerned for the fights where I need the brilliant from the cloak, and I need to avoid getting the tactician shaken/confused debuff from being flanked which will ordinarily dispell Brilliant, which Svef is good enough to prevent (it's not even a factor for the fire dragon fight because none of the magma oozes can actually flank me because they're ranged). (edit - not having brilliant active during a fight may contribute to tactician/skaen being slower than a bloodmage/skaen since I can't spam most abilities during fights, i'm only left with auto attack. With good timing I can do some mule kick spamming but that's about it until there's just a couple of enemies left that I can manually trigger flanked on and trigger tactician brilliant. At level 19 with my practice char now should be less of a concern since I'm hoping I can Storm of Holy Fire -> escape, brilliant, wait -> Storm of Holy Fire -> etc spam for the non-boss fights) Not directly related, but with solo tactician, the way it interacts with charm/dominate, is that as soon as you get charm/dominated, the tactician brilliant bonus kicks in and immediately dispels the charm/dominate (verified behavior from practicing FS which features lots of charm/dominate). I guess Vela doesn't count as an "enemy" for checking who's been flanked or not.

dumb question - what's the captain's banquet for? so far i've only needed to periodically use Svef (which gives resistance, not immunity). it's highly possible i've forgotten something.

color me just as surprised as you. they seem like textbook case of the same buff not stacking. maybe something got changed and they didn't use to stack. but at least for me it's 100% reproducible - i incurred some injuries from belranga, i drank a luminous adra potion, and found my skills were higher despite me thinking that since i had hylea's bonus active i wasn't going to get anything. loaded up a different experimental character, summoned up a hylea bounty and a luminous adra and combined one after the other, and sure enough i got a total of +4. would have been useful to know earlier on, might have saved me some skill respecs or tight stealth sections.

well gang, i'm cautiously optimistic. 25 days to do content that i got from above with that one trip back to nekataka removed gives me just barely enough time; 6 days for SSS, 2.5 days for FS, 2.5 days for BoW. that leaves about 2 days per other megaboss or boss left, and i've been able to take out nemnok and belrange in just one day (hauani o whe will probably be slowest at 1.5-2 days), effectively giving me more leeway to make timing mistakes later on. even though the path ahead is pretty clear now, it'll still be a couple weeks what with my schedule. but dang, thanks @Decadency for posting your vids here, just scouring them for clues and how you clear certain areas has really helped me squeeze out enough in-game time that I can still pull this run out of the toilet. i was probably gonna give up otherwise. to anyone else contemplating a run: don't do what thelee does - don't waste time going to motare o kozi. PS - something i only just discovered in act iv almost by chance is that the +2 all skills from hylea's bounty and +2 all skills from luminous adra stack. i think this will help out a bunch with some skill checks in the DLCs.

aha, well i noticed in the last video that motare o kozi isn't uncovered. i didn't friggin realize you could just the engolio de espiers wherever so i've been doing the huana faction quests even though i'm already doing 99% of the principi. so that definitely ate a lot of time to travel. (for some reason i seemed to think that engolio espiers being used only outside dunnage, and then having an extremely slow ghost boat to travel with all the way to the end) well, we'll see if i can find a way to squeeze in the last stuff, otherwise i'm going to have to start over, since i'm well past the point where i could re-path and ignore the huana faction quest. not so sure if i would start over with a tactician/skaen... edit - actually, this realization does save me some time, because now i don't have to waste time to travel back to/stay in nekataka to do the final huana faction quest (blowing up the powderhouse). saves just a day maybe, but every bit helps. edit 2 - gives me an extra day for content and removes one thing off my TODO list to worry about. getting there, we'll see.

i have to double-check but i think i have a level 4 navigator via worthless idiot. it comes a little bit later than one could get from crookspur; didn't know until watching decadency's videos that that option existed. edit - btw, i don't think going to nemnok then belranga before fire dragon will actually save me that much time. i'm going to have to more thoroughly examine the earlier decadency vids because it just seems like something along my route must've been extremely inefficient that i'm struggling to fit everything into the end.

well i'm squeezing the time a bit. a couple of minor pathing tweaks and got myself the voyager ship and now i have 23 days remaining for all the content. going to try the traveling circuit again with some palm sails and boneframe hull (an add'l +10m travel speed) and see how much time that gives. maybe with all that combined i'll have enough time for all the content.

well, going through the vids, the big thing is going to nemnok and belranga before the fire dragon. that seems like it shaves off some travel time (since i basically have to make a very similar trip in act iv to get to belranga). i'll have to check out my act iii pathing, i didn't think my quests worked out such that i had access to SoT to do boss fights - i needed the dump of experience from arriving at ashen maw to get to level 16. maybe this was all figured out in part 1 of this thread and i just missed it while i was recovering.

problem is that i don't have access to storm of holy fire (yet). i sped things up a bit with picking up shining beacon, but i'm starting act iv still "only" at level 16; i need 19 for storm of holy fire. i'm going through decadency's videos a little more closely now. it's possible that my act iii is super inefficient and i can shave off a lot of time there (thankfully my real character hasn't moved forward in act iii since i wanted to make absolutely sure my current path would work out; glad i did so).

welp, this is my nightmare. after verifying a water dragon clear with my practice char i decided to sail around with my practice char to see how much left I had for actual content, and when all sailing is done, I have 20 days for content (20 days just for sailing). Using some rough estimates, I need 24 days to do all the content... It's possible there might be a faster sailing route or some efficiencies I can get from some of the content (though I don't anticipate megabosses will be faster than 1.5 days, and timing FS on a practice clear it took 3 days roughly so I don't think I'll do better here), but tactician/skaen might just be too slow for the Ultimate. My real character is sitting still in Act III so I could reset my practice character to see if there's a better path, but I might be hitting a point soon where I have to toss in the towel on the tactician/skaen.

hm, another reason why skaen/bloodmage is better. rehearsing the water dragon fight, a plain tactician/skaen is literally impossible. there's just no way to de-aggro to actually do buffing. the only viable solution appears to be probably what decadency shows in their vid, which is to buff with the cloak brilliant buff before hand and carry it over from a previous fight (fortunately now i can use the blight summon explosion to my favor to act as a brilliant trigger). so either way, you're going to need a cloak (whereas before i just had it as a backup), so you don't get as much from the tactician. though i appreciate seeing your vids. i'm probably going to respec just to pick up shining beacon because with a mid-fight briliant trigger, just being able to spam any kind of aoe is probably going to a big help.

@Decadency, watching through some of your videos, I'm getting convinced that bloodmage/skaen (or bloodmage/priest+invis) is probably the best ultimate build, even if brilliant trigger is a bit more annoying than how a tactician could do it. Some of the fights that I struggle with on my rehearsal runs you have no problem with and it just boils down to the ability to AoE or DPS more consistently. Tactician/Skaen just really is rather slow when it's not a 1-on-1 or boss fight (not that it's particularly fast then, but at least it's pretty idiot-proof). Though it does hint to me that I need to respec to arcana sooner to help with some of the mob trash fights (I was saving that respec for my megaboss circuit). As an example - I'm trying to rehearse a water dragon clear with my practice character, and just the naga that i need to kill to get the quest item is getting a major headache, whereas you just happen to drop a couple of freezing pillars before all the blight summoning can get out of control. edit - i wonder if i could also get away with using serafen's weapon and using vela as a tank edit 2 - also learned a useful trick for keeping vela back from your vids, using spiritual ally to bring a mob back to trigger her cowering. thanks!

why? boy I wish I had any significant amount of time to get this done. i was mapping out my final act last night into chunks of time that i could do in one evening a piece, and that still will take me a couple weeks to do, and that's ignoring any roadblocks i hit with my practice character that i need to find a solution to (and thus re-rehearse).

one of the random galawain's abilities is that beasts stay stealthed until attack, and they become re-stealthed upon knocking out an ally (mostly moot for the ultimate). metagame knowledge/rehearsal is pretty good for not being surprised by invisible beasts.